Katja Lee Eliad's Map Maker Like Lyrical offers a retrospective view on the self-taught artist's work over the past two decades. The extensively illustrated book is accompanied by two essays by Valentina Iancu and Anca Verona Mihuleț and a conversation with the artist by Nicolas de Ribou, aiming to map the coordinates of a tortuous journey.
“Challenging, simple, queer, visionary, radical, experimental, playful, traumatic, tight, confusing, spiritual, mathematical, poetic and musical are the first attributes that crossed my mind to describe Katja Lee Eliad's art made in the past 20 years of work. She is flexible in messages as she easily crosses between mediums. The artist alternates the interest in universal topics, pursuing poetic or political research, with an intimate look into the personal space of the family. Once she goes deep into the intimacy of her private life, she throws all the cards on the table. No hiding, no secrets. Framing her unique world in specific art categories feels like confining in words a work that is, through its very nature, open”. (Valentina Iancu)
“Katja Eliad's practice is connected to the possibility of the working platform she handles for expanding her vision and for accommodating those referential corners of her memory. The working platform can be a notebook, a wall, a fence, a bicycle, a room or a house. It is an interchangeable environment that at times lacks any potential needed for creation and at times abounds in stimuli that at first are conflictual, but subsequently transform into equilibrium” (Anca Verona Mihuleț)
Katja Lee Eliad (born 1972 in Tel Aviv) is a cosmopolitan artist whose personal trajectory has been shaped by the experiences of migration, queer identity, complex family history, which also reflect in her artworks that arch across mediums, from drawing and painting to poetry, video and sound. Having to adapt to constantly shifting conditions, by often changing studios between France, Romania and the US, her artworks are diverse in terms of size and means of expression.
